Two Unitree G1s named IDA and Heinz are auditioning for a German warehouse job

Most humanoid deals start with the robot maker. This one starts with the warehouse. On November 2, ID Logistics, a French-listed contract logistics group, and Terra Robotics, a German multi-brand robot integrator, announced a strategic partnership that took effect on November 1. The goal is simple to state and hard to pull off: move humanoid robots out of a showcase and onto a working logistics floor in Germany within the next six months.

Meet the twins

The partnership grew out of an experiment the two companies started about a year ago. Each bought one Unitree G1 in its EDU6 configuration. ID Logistics keeps its robot, IDA, at its site in Griesheim. Terra Robotics keeps Heinz at its home base in Löhne, in North Rhine-Westphalia. The two teams programmed them together on the same sorting task, so that software changes could be tested in both places without shipping a robot back and forth between companies.

According to the companies, the robots can now tell cardboard boxes from shipping bags and use their five-fingered tactile hands to drop each item into the right shipping box. That sounds modest, and it is. But recognizing an object, choosing a grip that works on both a rigid carton and a floppy mailer, and placing it cleanly is exactly the kind of small, endlessly repeated motion that fills a fulfillment center. It is also a good test of the hands, which, as we noted when Chinese firms shipped nearly all of this year’s dexterous humanoid hands, are the part of a humanoid that still separates demos from useful work. Our humanoid hands guide covers the trade-offs.

What happens in the next six months

The plan has three steps. First, the partners will list four or five candidate jobs, such as picking, sorting, packing and other value-added services, and write down the technical and operational requirements for each. Over the coming weeks they will choose the one that suits a first pilot. Then Terra Robotics will pick a robot for that job from its portfolio, which includes humanoids from Unitree and UBTech, and the two teams will program it together, the same way they trained IDA and Heinz.

Neither the pilot site nor the task has been named, and no financial terms were disclosed. The companies also have not published throughput, error rates or how often a person had to step in during the sorting demo, which are the numbers that will decide whether this goes anywhere.

The most interesting line is about choice

Robin Otto, who runs ID Logistics in Germany, said one key lesson from the work so far is that warehouses will need different types of robots for different tasks, and that no single machine will handle every logistics job. That is a notable thing for a buyer to say out loud while most of the industry is selling the idea of one general-purpose humanoid.

It also explains why ID Logistics picked an integrator rather than a manufacturer. Terra Robotics is part of Germany’s Wortmann group, an IT maker with roughly 2,800 employees, and it sells several brands. A buyer working through a partner like that can swap robots as the market changes instead of betting its floor on one maker’s roadmap. For a field where new models arrive every few months, that flexibility may be worth more than an exclusive deal.

“Logistics is one of the sectors with the greatest potential for humanoid robotics in the coming years, alongside production,” said Terra Robotics CEO Murat Arpaci. “We must seize this window of opportunity if we want to be at the forefront.”

How it compares with GXO and Digit

The obvious comparison is GXO and Agility Robotics. As we wrote last week, GXO has been running Digit at a Georgia site since June 2024 and just signed up for two more U.S. buildings. That is a buyer that has already lived with a humanoid and decided to expand. ID Logistics is a few steps behind on that path. It has a demo, a partner and a deadline, but not yet a robot working a real shift.

The scale behind it is real, though. ID Logistics reported 3.7 billion euros in revenue for 2025 and runs 450 sites in 20 countries with about 55,000 employees, including 17 sites in Germany. If a pilot works at one of them, there is plenty of room to grow. The same is true of the robots. The G1 is one of the few humanoids anyone can order today, but it was built as a research and teaching machine, not a warehouse worker. Whether a robot like that can graduate to a real shift, or whether the job goes to a sturdier model, is part of what this pilot will show.

Our take

This is not a deployment yet, and it should not be read as one. It is a buyer-led test with a clear schedule and an honest admission that the right robot depends on the job. That is a healthier starting point than many splashy pilot announcements. The thing to watch is the spring: which task they pick, which robot gets it, and whether they publish real numbers from a live floor. We will track it alongside Digit, Apptronik and Figure on our humanoids page, and warehouse robotics roles are on our jobs board.